Archive for the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ Category

For whatever reason I opted to ride WoW down to the server shutdown tonight, enjoying my last action in the Wrath of the Lich King, patch 3.x era. I have amazing memories from this series of patches. I went hit levels 60, 70 and 80 during these patches. One of my very first posts here covered the changes in the original Wrath content patch. I ran my first dungeon, heroic dungeon and raid during these patches. I fought my first battlegrounds during the 3.x run, and of course, I fought relentlessly in Lake Wintergrasp.

Actually, that’s one of the things I did while riding the Wrath patches to their end. The Alliance again successfully repelled the Horde, even though they had a tenacity of 10x (and health in the 100k range). I went as prot again and had fun. Once that was over, though, I opted to go to Ironforge to wait to train.

While waiting for the server to shut down, I fished for Old Ironjaw. No luck, as you would imagine.

There Gav now sits, waiting for the servers to go live with patch 4.0.1 so he can train his new skills. What will he do with them first? Maybe Wintergrasp again, maybe a random heroic. Only time will tell – and the time will come tomorrow.

I queued for a random heroic last night for the first time in I can’t tell you how long (wait a minute, yes I can – 16 days ago) and wound up in Hall of Stone. I dislike the Ulduar heroics for their difficulty. Aside from the Ice Crown Citadel heroics, they’re as hard as heroics come these days. In particular, I dislike the Tribunal of Ancients event in HoS. The mobs inevitably get loose from the tank in the chaos and attack me, attack the other DPS, attack the healer, and attack me (that’s worth mentioning twice). This time it was fairly straight forward, with us kicking the invaders asses left and right. Our party was doing massive damage (sorry, I didn’t have my DPS meter on so I don’t know exactly how much), but our resto druid was the big hero. Our timber-riffic healer kept everyone topped off with aplomb. After that, Sjonnir the Ironshaper was a breeze. No loot, but that’s no big deal. I got my gold and two frost emblems and that’s what I went for.

I mentioned a while ago that Heroic Violet Hold is a breeze so long as Xevozz doesn’t show up. Well, in a recent PUG run, he poked his ugly head out. This was actually the first time I’d ever faced him, but I’d read up on what I was supposed to do so I wasn’t a liability. We whooped his ass and I got a new achievement, Lockdown. We proceeded to ice the rest of the run with little difficulty.

I guess when you way out-gear him and know his tricks, Xevozz isn’t such a pain in the ass as I thought.

It was a PvP morning for Gav. I joined a random battleground and ended up in Alterac Valley.

It was kind of sad for me because I followed a contingent to attack the Horde leader, and we did – and I died – but the Horde was just a little faster, and we lost. The next battle was Arathi Basin, where I’ve never won.

I want to point out that I went to AV as ret to try out my new axe, which failed miserably. I decided to go prot in AB, which made a huge difference.

I died once early on when I went into battle thinking I had backup (but I didn’t) and another time during a scrum near the lumber mill. Those were my only deaths though. Thanks to good durability, judicious use of my powers and superb healers, I pretty much locked down the farm. People came and left, but I held it down. A couple times I thought I was screwed only to be saved by the sudden appearance of a healer on our side. Thanks, guys! I ended the match with 2 deaths (least of anyone with at more then 1 kill), 5 killing blows (4th on our side) and 71 honorable kills (best on our side). Go Gav!

Oh, and thanks to running those dungeons last night, I got a mammoth reward.

This was the image the greeted me upon joining a PUG a short while ago. The Pit of Saron! I’d never been there before, obviously. Fortunately, we had a great group. One other player had never done it before, but we had a very experienced tank which was very good for our confidence. He calmly described every fight to us for optimal success and kept giving us praise for getting things right. Anyway, upon entering a cave (I joined half-way through) leading to the final boss, the tank said to not cast, heal or hit anything until he gathered all the mobs onto a platform in the middle of the cave. Suicide. Absolute suicide. Or rather, it would be…

… if I wasn’t there.

By the time he got to the platform he 90%+ dead, so right before he died I hit him with my Lay on Hands and we all survived. We entered Scourgelod Tyrannus’ room and gathered ourselves for the battle. The tank commanded the rest of the DPS to his flanks, and the battle commenced. It was a LONG battle, too. I put forth 3.6k DPS (!) and we killed him with no casualties. Yes! Oh, and as icing on the cake, he dropped the Tyrannical Beheader, and I got it to replace my Edge of Ruin. HELL YEAH!

Great. The Oculus. I don’t like that place much, but that’s where the Random Dungeon Finder sent me tonight. I ended up in a slick group though, and we blitzed the place. We decided to go for some achievements and rode only Amber drakes into battle. I didn’t do great (my DPS was down for whatever reason) and right before we fought Mage-Lord Urom, our tank dropped. A full minute later, we got a new pally tank. Yay! He too was fast and efficient. This was an easy run! Except…

Lay Guardian Eregos shot me off my drake again near the end of the battle. Fortunately, my party was able to peal him off of me before he could kill me, so there I was, on the middle platform, taking pot-shots at him with Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath for the last 10% of his health or so.

I returned to Wintergrasp twice yesterday. The first match was epically boring, because we had 25+ players and we saw a total of three members of the Horde: a death knight, a warlock and a paladin. That led them to have over 130k health a piece! It was like taking on some crazy elite mob. That made it hard to get siege engines to drop their towers (we were on defense) because there was just about no one to kill. We did though, and kind of just chilled until the timer ran out. It was the most lame WG match I’d ever been in

The seconds match I attended was more even. I got my 5,000th honorable kill this match, which is kinda lame for how often I do WG. We again chased the Horde around the map, slaying them left and right. Afterwards, I found myself exactly 2 stone keeper shards from my Black War Mammoth. Again, for how often I play WG I probably should have already had one, but I used to cash in my stone keeper shards for honor, and a couple hundred went toward heirlooms for my alts. Still, I’m almost there now.

Bronze Drake! Bronze Drake, Bronze Drake, Bronze Drake! Finally, after countless runs through Heroic Culling of Stratholme, I got the drake. Yay! I was in a PUG that had a malcontent from the start. He finally quit when we ignored him, about two minutes into the run. Apparently an executive decision was made (i.e. I wasn’t consulted) to four-man the run. We did, and it was a breeze. We had a mage doing 4.5k DPS, our tank was putting out 3.1k, and I was kinda bringing up the rear at 2.8k. That plus a kick-ass resto shaman was enough to blitz the dungeon, 4-man style.

Ah, memories. I was back in Violet Hold today, for the first time since the day before the Random Dungeon Finder was implemented. Ichoron was a hassle, Moragg was a pushover, and Cyanigosa was her usual sissy self. So long as Xevozz doesn’t show up, Violet Hold is a breeze. I’ve killed Cyanigosa a dozen times now on Heroic. It was nice to do an easy dungeon for once!

I found myself in Wintergrasp twice the other morning, once as my prot PvP spec and once as my main ret PvE spec (because I was in a hurry). The first match – the one I joined as PvP – was a thorough butt kicking of the Horde. We had them pinned down to their graveyard and just slaughtered them every time they rezzed. It was fun! I did really well too, and only died once, killing – or helping kill – dozens of the Horde.

The second match (the one I joined while ret) wasn’t so pretty, but it was more entertaining. I joined a little late, only about three minutes late, but already it was a disaster. The Horde was in the eastern side of the keep! After dying over and over again, we finally accrued enough manpower to stand up to them (our numbers started out pretty low for whatever reason). We finally pushed them out of the east side of the keep and down to the Sunken Ring workshop. I and a number of allies then rode back to hold off an attack on the west side of the keep. They got in there, too, but that’s all the farther they got. We had actually dropped all of their towers, but that still left us with 10 minutes to hold out, and we did it. Yes!

Hi, I’m Alphasim . I’ve been playing World of WarCraft for four years now and my main is a level 85 human paladin named Gavelier. Gav features prominently here at Alazar so you'll get to know him and his guild.

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